Greetings.  I am performance tuning an apache installation.
ubuntu 6.04, Apache/2.0.55. 
I am using siege as my traffic generator.
I've noticed that my apache processes stop serving after about 8-10 seconds.

I've not managed to get more than 280 connections served per second.
I've noticed that my apache processes stop serving after about 8 seconds.
siege times out and manual wget processes take 30 seconds or more.
/var/log/messages and /var/log/apache2/error.log don't have any messages.
/var/log/apache2/site.log shows the burst of traffic then the long delay.
Turning on Loglevel debug didn't help.

Switching from apache2-mpm-worker to apache2-mpm-prefork didn't help
either.

I've not managed to get more than 280 connections served per second.
/var/log/messages and /var/log/apache2/error.log don't have any messages.

/var/www/site contains about 8 html files, with various stylesheets,
images, etc.

Nothing complicated like perl or mod_ssl.  A very simple installation.

This is on a dual core 2ghz xeon server with 2G ram.

I've not managed to get more than 280 connections served per second.
I've noticed that I can serve quite a few connections for about 8-10
seconds then the apache processes freeze up for minutes at a time.  I
have plenty of ram.  My config contains:

<IfModule worker.c>
ServerLimit         16
StartServers        5
MaxClients          150
MinSpareThreads     25
MaxSpareThreads     75
ThreadsPerChild     25
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>

<IfModule prefork.c>
ServerLimit         600
StartServers        100
MinSpareServers       5
MaxSpareServers      10
MaxClients          600
MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>